The Walking Dead: Destinies Review

ign.com:

Zombies can be fun to mow down, but they also run the risk of being one of the least interesting monster enemy types around: a slow, lumbering, decaying husk that’s better off buried than occupying our attention. If nothing else, The Walking Dead: Destinies, based off the otherwise fantastic early seasons of the TV show, succeeds in embodying all their worst qualities. In its ugly, shuffling attempts to stand tall even while looking like rotting husk of a game from the Xbox 360 days, Destinies deserves neither your attention nor access to your wallet – and we would be better off if this boring mess had stayed buried in the past, from which it seems to have exhumed its broken mechanics. While it earns a small amount of credit for at least attempting to play with plots that diverge from the TV show, little else is done to elevate it above the muck of banal design, awful character models, and the laughable sense that this is barely a rough draft of a game.

Longtime fans of the TV show are clearly the target audience here, since the characters poorly mimic the visual likenesses of their real performers. But aside from trying to strike a chord through recognisability, Destinies presumes you know the entire melody as you’re unceremoniously thrown into the shoes of Rick Grimes after he wakes up in the hospital alone.

It is here – right at the beginning of what became eight to nine painful hours – that everything falls apart.

The hospital is, naturally, filled with zombies and Rick must find his way out with some basic mechanics like pushing, sneaking, and healing that we’ve seen in essentially every third-person post-apocalyptic horror game ever, but worse. Zombies are, of course, mindless by design, but these are some of the